Hey! This happened to me, too!

About twenty years ago I was asked to tutor my neighbor's son. The kid was sixteen years old, in 10th grade, and struggling in school. His grades were consistently floating in the "C" area. The mom thought that he just needed a little extra help.

I brought him in and had him take some tests just so I could see where he stood. When it came time to write an essay, there was NO HOPE. He managed one mangled paragraph with the worst spelling I've ever seen in my life. My seven year old dyslexic daughter was easily reading Harry Potter at the time and my six year old son could write and spell better than this kid. He was struggling to read at a 3rd grade level. He spoke 'ghetto' so he didn't even have verbal language to fall back on for grammar.

I realized that he really needed to start from scratch. He had to be taught the basic principles of phonics so he'd have a solid foundation to build on.

So he came over for his first real tutoring session and I got out the books that were closer to his level. I did take him down a bit. I figured that he could whiz through some of the easy stuff, snap up those principles, then we could start challenging him a bit more. I really thought that I could get him pretty close to his actual age range in about a year if we buckled down.

The next day mama came banging on my door. She called me a racist and accused me of deliberately humiliating her son because he was a black kid. The saddest part is that she told me that she knew I was wrong about his abilities or he never would've made it to the 10th grade. She insisted that the fact that he'd never gotten anything lower than a "C" proved that he wasn't that far behind. I was fired on the spot.

The school did her son a serious disservice; but she did, too. By coddling her baby and refusing to even consider that he might be in real trouble, She cheated her son out of his ONE opportunity to thrive academically. Instead, she took it all as a racist insult.

Hey! This happened to me, too!

About twenty years ago I was asked to tutor my neighbor's son. The kid was sixteen years old, in 10th grade, and struggling in school. His grades were consistently floating in the "C" area. The mom thought that he just needed a little extra help.

I brought him in and had him take some tests just so I could see where he stood. When it came time to write an essay, there was NO HOPE. He managed one mangled paragraph with the worst spelling I've ever seen in my life. My seven year old dyslexic daughter was easily reading Harry Potter at the time and my six year old son could write and spell better than this kid. This kid was struggling to read at a 3rd grade level. He spoke 'ghetto' so he didn't even had verbal language to fall back on for grammar.

I realized that he really needed to start from scratch. He had to be taught the basic principles of phonics so he'd have a solid foundation to build on.

So he came over for his first real tutoring session and I got out the books that were closer to his level. I did take him down a bit. I figured that he could whiz through some of the easy stuff, snap up those principles, then we could start challenging him a bit more. I really thought that I could get him pretty close to his actual age range in about a year if we buckled down.

The next day mama came banging on my door. She called me a racist and accused me of deliberately humiliating her son because he was a black kid. The saddest part is that she told me that she knew I was wrong about his abilities or he never would've made it to the 10th grade. She insisted that the fact that he'd never gotten anything lower than a "C" proved that he wasn't that far behind. I was fired on the spot.

The school did her son a serious disservice; but she did, too. By coddling her baby and refusing to even consider that he might be in real trouble, She cheated her son out of his ONE opportunity to thrive academically. Instead, she took it all as a racist insult.